The Court of the Air

Chapter Twenty-Three

Prince Alpheus was dragged shouting to the cross and strapped onto the cold stone. ‘Leave my arms alone, we had a deal — I helped you jiggers.’

‘And so you shall help us again,’ said Tzlayloc. ‘And you need not worry about us removing your arms, compatriot. Symbolic gestures were needed when the old regime required the passions of the mob to be diverted. I have more direct ways of controlling their fervour.’

The prince tried to turn his head to look at the crystal full of bubbling blood. ‘What’s that? What are you doing?’

‘It is a lens to amplify your nerve endings. Now be silent, lest you wear yourself out. You will need all of your strength soon. As it is, I suspect you will not last as long as my darling girl.’

‘You said you would set me free!’

‘I did, didn’t I?’ said Tzlayloc. ‘And by a strange twist of irony, compatriot, it is you who will set the people free with your blood.’

‘I am not a royal any more,’ sobbed Alpheus. ‘I abdicate — I told you I would. You can have the throne. I just want to go to the Fey Free State.’

‘It is not your royal blood which I require,’ said Tzlayloc. ‘How curious that Greenhall has no record of there ever having been a joining between the House of Vindex and your line, and more curious still that no one with the blood curse ever surfaced in the royal breeding house before. Still, that is what comes of letting you filthy vermin interbreed without proper supervision.’

‘What blood curse? I am not under any curse. Let me go, please, for Circle’s sake.’

‘The symbolism of your place in history shall be different,’ said Tzlayloc. ‘Not a valorous angel of the proletariat giving her life for the cause. Instead, the last peg of tyranny who needed to be dragged down to seal our courageous new realm.’

The locust priests finished securing Alpheus to the stone cross and nodded to the Chairman of the First Committee.

‘I want to leave the palace,’ screamed Alpheus. ‘I want to leave Middlesteel.’

‘You are not in Middlesteel any more, compatriot. When we are finished we’ll find you a suitable place at the museum, stuffed, next door to an example of a mill owner. The last King of Jackals, uncrowned.’

‘Please, you promised-’

Tzlayloc looked at the locust priests. ‘By all means stop his whining. My head is starting to ache with it.’

The priests traced sigils on the activation glass and Alpheus’s howling filled the subterranean chamber.

‘That’s better.’

Behind the prince the blood of the last of the operators boiled in fury, joining him in his agony. Tzlayloc nodded in satisfaction. Somewhere below, that filthy machine would be writhing in suffering too. Even if poor Molly Templar had not yet given her life to the cause, there were only two operators for the Hexmachina to distribute its essence between. One fleeing for her life, the other having his life crushed out of him.

His smugness turned to dissatisfaction as he caught a glimpse of himself in the reflection of the blood crystal. He was getting corpulent. He looked at the locust priests and noticed for the first time that so were they. It was all the run-offs from the equalization mills; that and the harvest of hearts from the new Gideon’s Collars. With so many offerings to the Wildcaotyl it was hard to resist sampling some of the nourishment. For a moment the consideration that it was an inequality for him and the shepherds of the faith to have so much briefly suggested itself to Tzlayloc, but then the thought passed. Theirs was a heavy vocation with heavy demands — their bodies needed a heavy fuel to keep them in the condition that the revolution required of them. It was strange, though, how the more he ate the hungrier he became. He would have the Chimecan device moved to Parliament Square, into the light, Tzlayloc decided. He would feel better when he could watch the agony of the last monarch of Jackals from the windows of the House of Guardians.

Alpheus’s scream changed pitch as the machine sought to surprise him with its ingenuity, varying the play of torture across his body. Tzlayloc ruffled the prince’s hair. So short, so lank and dreary compared to Compatriot Templar’s long fiery tresses. Everyone was doing his and her bit. Everyone had a purpose in the new order. Even a filthy royalist.

Relieved of their weapons, Oliver, Hoggstone and Commodore Black sat in a chamber made surprisingly homely given its location in a long-abandoned atmospheric station. Only the presence of the outlaws armed with old rifles and crossbows pointing at them gave away the fact that they were not sitting in a gentleman’s library.

Benjamin Carl wheeled himself into the room and navigated his wheelchair up to a table adorned with an old double-headed brass oil lamp. His head shone in the light, a slight silver tonsure all that was left of the ageing revolutionary’s hair.

‘Now then, fellow,’ said the commodore. ‘Do you plan to torture us? I see no wicked thumbscrews on your table.’

‘Torture? I used to regard having to listen to Hoggstone’s Purist friends campaign from the stump as torture. No, I thought we might have a nice pot of caffeel. Damson Barbary, if you would be mother.’

The girl who had betrayed them ducked out of the library, returning with a steaming porcelain pot and four cups.

‘Time has been kind to you, Carl,’ said Hoggstone. ‘For someone I believed was dead up to a couple of weeks ago. Apart from the bath chair…’

Benjamin Carl slapped the iron spokes of his wheels. ‘Age didn’t put me in here, First Guardian. Some rogues more or less on your side of the political debate abducted me. I had to jump from a round black aerostat and the landing was not kind to me.’

‘The secret court? And here’s me thinking they were an old politician’s tale spun to keep me on the straight and narrow. You always did have a devil’s luck, Carl.’

‘They’re real enough.’ The old revolutionary indicated the walls of his domain. ‘And you’re sharing my luck now, First Guardian. You in your pauper’s rags smelling of garbage, while the Third Brigade strut around Middlesteel’s avenues in parade formation.’

‘The Commonshare are your children, Carl. Does your heart swell with pride when you see what they have accomplished?’

Benjamin Carl swivelled his chair to pull out a book from one of the shelves. ‘Community and the Commons, a first edition. Priceless on the black market since you banned it.’ He hurled the book at Hoggstone. ‘You tell me, you Purist cretin, you tell me where it says in here that we should set up camps to steal children and raise them away from their parents, that we should line up the people of a nation in the shadow of a Gideon’s Collar, that one state should invade another, that we should employ a mob of ruffians to kick down doors and drag people to flesh mills. You find where I wrote that!’

Hoggstone picked up the book and waved it back at Benjamin Carl. ‘The words might not be in there, Carl, but that’s what it takes to impose your perfect beehive of a society on people who are born on their own, die on their own and live their lives by the one and one.’

‘We may be born on our own into the world, Purist, but there’s no immutable law of nature that connects a piece of land or strings a birthright to a swaddling. We are born into a world that belongs to all of us equally.’

‘That’s just a fancy letter of marque for a highwayman, Carl. Your community is a licence for those who have spent their lives idling to ride up to the farmer breaking his back in the field and demand a fair share of the harvest at the point of a sabre.’

‘I’m wasting my time with you, Purist,’ shouted Carl.

‘Give me back my debating stick, sir, and I’ll give you the lesson your people didn’t have the guts to learn at the ballot in 1566.’

Oliver interposed himself between the two quarrelling men, his pistols back in his hands — the outlaw who had been holding them along with Hoggstone’s debating stick incredulous that the brace of guns had disappeared out of his grasp. Two of the crossbow men loosed their bolts; Oliver tossed a pistol in the air, turned and watched one bolt thud into a bookcase — he caught the other bolt and slammed its metal head into the desk, the quarrel quivering, before catching the pistol and filling the room with his demon’s laugh.

‘Time for that cup of caffeel, Ben Carl,’ said Oliver. ‘You haven’t gone to the trouble of bringing the First Guardian here to discuss political philosophy.’

‘Who are you, compatriot?’

‘I am the people you two buffoons claim to be working for.’

‘And you don’t want to be upsetting the people, now,’ pointed out the commodore.

‘Perish the thought,’ agreed Carl. ‘It hasn’t escaped my notice that the parties have put aside their differences and are working together now. I thought you might consider a … wider alliance?’

‘With you?’ said Hoggstone. ‘Dear Circle, man, I thought you would be cock-a-hoop — in case you haven’t noticed, it’s your people strutting about up on the surface now.’

‘Jacob Walwyn was a brilliant scholar, Hoggstone. The best student I ever lectured. When I first knew him he was a gentle man who spent his Circledays teaching poorhouse foundlings how to read. After sixty-six he endured two weeks of beatings and torture from the political police. Not in official custody, mind. He was in the hands of one of your patriot squads. After he escaped the price on his head was second only to mine. Which of us, I wonder, taught the man who now calls himself Tzlayloc his lessons best?’

‘Your agitators nearly started a civil war in Jackals,’ said Hoggstone. ‘Across the border Quatershift has been bathing in the blood of your legacy for a decade. Why, sir, should I sign a pact with the devil?’

Carl filled one of the porcelain cups and offered it to the First Guardian. ‘For the same reason I must, compatriot Purist. I would not suffer your tyranny, but Tzlayloc’s is infinitely crueller — the more repugnant to me that he seeks to dress it up with his twisted rendering of the communityist truth. Neither of us on our own is strong enough to overthrow them, but perhaps together… did you ever really read my book, Hoggstone, before you threw it on the fire?’

‘Your damn philosophy has been nothing but a plague on my house,’ said the First Guardian. ‘Of course I did.’

‘Do you remember the last line of it?’

Commodore Black lifted up the tome from the table and turned the pages to the end. ‘Strength has no meaning unless it is used in the service of the weak. One stick may be snapped but the bundle is a community, and the community will never break.’

‘An alliance with a Carlist,’ said Hoggstone. ‘The House of Guardians will have me impeached after this. How many loyalists do you have?’

‘I have a whole city full of them, First Guardian. It is time for the voice of the people to be heard again.’

Hoggstone lifted his cup. ‘To the people, you communityist dog.’

‘To the people then, you Purist slave master.’

Oliver nodded in approval and holstered his two belt pistols. Hoggstone looked at him as he made ready to leave.

‘Shootist, this is a historic moment. Where are you going?’

‘Where else when the lunatics have taken over? I am going to pay a visit to the asylum.’

Molly was beginning to wish that she had drunk more water when she’d had the opportunity. Every hour they travelled the heat seemed to get more oppressive, sapping her ability to keep up the pace. It was only the increasing strength being channelled by her proximity to the Hexmachina that was allowing her to continue. She had tried riding on the back of Slowstack’s hull but the metal of his surface had become scalding; she could have fried a side of ham across the steamman’s body if she had one.

There was water somewhere, still being drawn through hidden cooling channels by the Chimecan crystals that survived this far down. She could tell by the haze of mist that filled some of the rooms. The extra burden of functioning this deep meant the crystals had fared far worse than the ones in the Duitzilopochtli Deeps. Many had melted or fractured under the strain of the heat, entire chains of the devices split open like hatched eggs. Bony glass splinters littered the floors of the passages where they had exploded.

Molly slowed down. On the passage wall were lines etched in stone, oblong shapes with stone circles inside them. She imagined a reservoir behind the wall, as cold and as cool as the irrigation waters that had fed the people crops in the higher cities.

‘Let’s stop, Slowstack.’ She hit the wall. ‘We need water before we drop.’

Slowstack came back to her, his stack spotted a fierce orange where the metal was overheating. ‘We understand, Molly soft-body, but we must continue. We are so close now.’

She hit the wall again. ‘There’s water behind here.’

‘No, Molly.’ He traced his manipulator arm over the sigils carved in the stone. ‘This is not a coolant pipe. This is a sink for draining away the pressure of the magma that the earth passes this deep within her body — liquid fire and earth, Molly softbody. These are escape vents in case the channels overload.’

Molly groaned and sunk to her knees to rest. ‘How could the Chimecans bear to live down here?’

‘Their coolant mechanisms had not suffered from a thousand years of neglect, Molly softbody. And the heat was valuable; it could be passed through exchangers and used to help keep the nations of the surface subservient to the empire during the harshest years of the coldtime. They needed their cattle — their slaves and food stock — kept alive.’

Reluctantly Molly continued to follow the steamman. The caverns they passed through were smaller now, some of the ziggurats and stalactite towers unfinished, abandoned during the Chimecans’ twilight years. A twilight her ancestor had helped inflict on them. Increasingly their passage was blocked — halls where stone fire doors had been triggered by magma breaches ahead, corridors that ended in unfinished caves.

In one of the dead-end caves there was a pile of bones so old they crumbled to dust when she tried to pick them up. There was no armour, Chimecan jewellery or scraps of clothes as with the other skeletons she had seen, but there were some links from an old leg chain. ‘A work gang,’ said Molly. ‘Digging out a new city for their masters, poor souls.’

‘We suspect not,’ said Slowstack. ‘There is no way forward here, we must go back.’

Molly trudged after the steamman as he reversed his tracks. ‘But there are chains back there?’

‘Only the upper cities were dug with slave labour, Molly softbody, when life on the skin of the world was more populous and there were millions to be discarded digging out the caverns. The bones you saw were not tunnellers; they were a tribute of food, minerals in their body a delicacy for a whitegnaw, created by the flesh mages of Chimeca. The whitegnaw was the miner. Those poor softbodies were merely a plate of sweetmeats sacrificed to her.’

‘You have seen this thing, Slowstack, back when you were Silver Onestack?’

‘All the great rock tunnellers are female, Molly softbody. They split in two before they die; the aged self expires and the daughter self burrows on. You need not be concerned, the Hexmachina has hunted down most of them for her lover, the Earth.’

‘Most of them?’

‘There is one whitegnaw that attacked Grimhope — she is old and canny and has evaded the Hexmachina; it is believed she was a Chimecan noblewoman who murdered her family and was sentenced to transformation into a rock worm for her crime. The outlaws’ legend says she decided she would never die and would keep her hunger alive long enough to outlast the empire and all its works.’

Molly wiped the condensation off the steamman’s vision plate with the sleeve of her tattered dress. ‘She has certainly done that.’

‘Hunger is a terrible thing, Molly softbody. A hungry creature will forget its intellect, its morality and its gods — in its desperation, a hungry creature is capable of almost anything. The Chimecans were once not so different from your people. Such a life is to be pitied. Mass starvation drove them to terrible crimes, to worship terrible things.’

‘When the Hexmachina showed you how to fuse your two bodies together I think she left a little of her essence with you, Slowstack.’

‘She was with us, Molly softbody. Even when we were Silver Onestack, only once a desecration, a leper among the people of the metal. Now we are twice a desecration and she is still inside us. If we live through this the people of the metal will not believe it. That the holiest of machines has made a twisted desecration its instrument.’

‘They will believe it,’ said Molly. ‘I’ll have our part in this written into a Dock Street penny dreadful and send copies of it to King Steam until they sing your name in their hymns.’

‘And what will you call your fiction?’

“‘The Terror of the Crystal Caves”,’ said Molly. ‘Except they’ll get my feelings wrong. They’ll have me being brave and valiant all the way through the story. Not scared and tired and so hot I might throw the whole thing away for a glass of cold water. Everything I do in the story will be because I planned it, not because I had no choice.’

‘You have had a choice, Molly softbody,’ said the steamman, ‘and you have followed your path and stayed true to it. There is no greater bravery than that. The Hexmachina showed us glimpses of a world where you did not — and it was a dark, cold, quiet, terrible place. Sometimes the fate of the land turns on the common actions of a common individual.’

‘I am not sure it should have been me, Slowstack. Out of everyone in Jackals, I keep on asking why this has fallen upon me. I’m just a Sun Gate scruff that everyone predicted would end up running the streets with the flash mob. Better this duty had fallen to an adventurer like Amelia Harsh or a handsome deck officer on an aerostat. I don’t have a family; I don’t even have a living. Out of everyone in the world, why me?’

‘The great pattern has woven your place in its fabric better than you know, Molly softbody,’ said Slowstack. ‘The blood of Vindex runs in your veins, not just in a literal sense — you are a true heir to his legacy. Out of all his descendants with the blood-song singing within their veins we can imagine no other we would rather have at our side.’

The last syllable of the steamman’s words was lost in the howl that echoed off the walls of the passage.

‘That is a softbody throat,’ said Slowstack.

‘Not merely the race of man,’ said Molly. ‘Those things are ridden by dirty Loas.’

She extended her senses, felt the rush of the Hexmachina’s voyage through the magma. The Hexmachina was at least an hour away from their position.

They started speeding away from the noise, but Molly was reluctant to flee, checking the path with her hands, looking for something.

‘Molly softbody?’

‘They are too near, Slowstack. They’ll run us down in minutes.’

‘I have no weapon capable of harming the Wildcaotyl,’ said the steamman. ‘Even a pair of minor entities. Are you joined yet with the Hexmachina?’

Molly shook her head. ‘We should save our strength, stand here and face them down.’

‘You can smell another pack of wild pecks?’

‘The only thing worth hunting down here is us, old steamer.’ She pulled him towards her. ‘By my side, Slowstack. Don’t try and throw yourself in front of me. No heroic sacrifices.’

Down the passage the two convicts rounded the corner, rolling in two spheres of black light suspended above the ground, their hands crackling with an incinerating fire. They sighted their prey and accelerated towards Molly and Slowstack with a howl which was a roar of triumph channelled through burning human throats.

‘This is chaos,’ shouted Oliver.

Third Brigade soldiers were falling back at the other end of the street in a disciplined line, one rank firing, while the troops who had retreated a couple of steps behind them reloaded from their bandoliers. On Nagcross Bridge equalized revolutionaries were being picked up by their iron legs by rebels and tossed into the Gambleflowers, political fighters running along the shops on the bridge and brandishing their debating sticks.

Commodore Black had one of the dead shifties’ carbines and he shot it with the accuracy of a long rifle, Third Brigade troops dropping with each charge he broke. ‘Use the cover, lad. Your fey skull will stop a bullet the same as any other.’

One of Benjamin Carl’s officers ran up to them, his only mark of rank a red band of cloth bound around his arm. ‘They’ve started putting pickets on the sewer gates, we can’t get our people behind them.’

‘The other bridges?’ asked Oliver.

‘Even better defended than this one.’

Nagcross Bridge had to fall. Oliver looked at the ranks of soldiers at the other end of the bridge. They were sheltering behind an interlocking wooden rampart — one of the mobile barricades they erected to seal off troublesome districts back in the Quatershiftian cities. As he watched a column of soldiers came into view marching in quickstep, reinforcing the position to the north of the bridge.

‘Different uniforms,’ said the commodore. ‘Look, caps, not shakos. The marshal has swallowed his pride and is bringing in another brigade to help crush the city.’

On their side of the lines an old steamman came into sight, supported by a couple of young political fighters from the party of the Levellers.

‘Guardian Tinfold,’ said the Carlist officer.

Tinfold made a weary whistle as steam escaped out from beneath his metal plates. ‘I told Hoggstone our forces were not prepared for an all-out assault. I counselled for a guerrilla campaign.’

Oliver pointed to the Quatershiftian soldiers blocking the north end of the bridge. ‘Time is their ally, old steamer, not ours. If we don’t free Middlesteel before the cursewall is lowered you’ll have your guerrilla war — generation after generation of fighting from caves in the uplands.’

‘Fastbloods are so hasty,’ sighed the politician. ‘Well then, we must save Jackals from the folly of our alacrity. Our people in the city are cut off now; we must open a passage to the pocket or suffer encirclement and defeat. Nagcross Bridge must fall.’

At the shiftie end of the bridge fresh ammunition boxes had been brought up and the troops felt emboldened enough to start a volley of fire that started cutting down the rioting street fighters. Debating sticks smashed aside doors as the ragtag army took cover.

A couple of fast-bowlers with glass grenades tried running out onto the bridge and pitching the explosives towards the north end, but the range was too far even for the two four-poles fanatics, the explosions showering flames at the foot of the barricade as the Third Brigade cut down the two players. From the rebels a traditional flutter of applause sounded as they honoured the dead men’s fatal innings.

Oliver turned as a clatter of hooves reverberated behind them, half expecting to face a charge of exomounts. But instead of heavy cavalry, Oliver saw a line of horses with a collection of riders as motley as the city fighters’ own forces. There were huntsmen from the villages wearing red tunics that could almost pass for redcoat uniforms, the black greatcoats of mail coachmen, the blue uniforms of the county constabulary, and, by far the greater number, hundreds of roamers — wild gypsies in a flurry of colours, their fire witches riding without saddles and naked, war paint swirled around lithe muscles. At their head was a riding officer of the House Horse Guards, parliament’s oldest cavalry regiment.

‘Jack Dibnah,’ shouted the riding officer, adjusting his roundhead-style helmet. ‘Mad Jack to m’friends. Late of the House’s own. Been out hunting any shifties foolish enough to stick their heads into the royal county of Stainfolk. Heard there were some of the buggers in Middlesteel needing stringing up too.’

He pointed at the hundreds of horses behind him, sixers mostly, whippet-thin and panting from the thrill of the ride. ‘Dibnah’s irregulars. Not much for parade turns but handy enough with a sabre or a lance.’

One of the fire witches kicked her horse up to the front of the column. ‘Enough of your prattle, we were promised the blood of the beng that drove us from the plains of Natsia.’

Mad Jack winked at Oliver and the commodore. ‘Not much for the niceties of command either, but they’re spirited fillies, eh?’ He looked over at the steamman politician. ‘You with that lot camped out east?’

‘I am the honourable member for Workbarrows, young softbody,’ said Guardian Tinfold. ‘Which lot are you referring to?’

‘Good Circle, man, there’s a whole army of your people camped east of the Gambleflowers.’

‘King Steam has honoured the ancient treaty,’ said Tinfold.

Bullets whistled past Mad Jack’s helmet, but he just swatted at the air, as if horseflies drawn to the sweat of his sixer were bothering him.

‘We need the steammen here,’ said the Carlist officer. ‘Why aren’t they marching to our relief?’

‘King Steam is bound by the treaty,’ whistled Tinfold. ‘No army from the Free State will cross the Gambleflowers unless it is invited to do so by the House of Guardians.

‘Is King Steam mortal insane?’ said Commodore Black. ‘The Third Brigade is murdering us down here. If we can’t break through soon their gallopers will be hauled up and they’ll be giving us the whiff of their cannon.’

‘I must go to them,’ said Tinfold. ‘They must accept my command as a Guardian to traverse the river.’ He turned to Mad Jack. ‘Will your horse carry me?’

‘On the flat of a cart maybe, old steamer. Don’t you see how you’re spooking her?’

Oliver indicated the fast flowing waters of the Gambleflowers. ‘That will carry you fast enough.’

‘Would you have us drift the Guardian down the Gambleflowers like a barrel?’ asked the commodore. ‘The refugees floated away on every skiff that could hold out the mortal river.’

‘Not quite everything.’

Commodore Black looked with horror to where Oliver was pointing, at a boat converted into a tavern moored to the banks of the river. ‘A jinn house, lad? You’d risk our fate to an old tub that hasn’t been cast off the banks of Middlesteel for a decade or more?’

‘With an experienced skipper at the wheel, commodore.’

‘No, lad. Don’t ask that of me. Haven’t I been put in harm’s way enough? My fine house filled with wicked shifties, my friends and companions slaughtered underground with half the armies of the Commonshare trying to see us off the same way. Those troops on the bridge would fill the tub full of holes as soon as they saw us making off with her.’

‘Let’s see if we can’t throw their aim for you,’ said Oliver. He looked up at the cavalry. ‘I heard that horses won’t jump a line with bayonets.’

The gypsy witch looked at him with contempt. ‘These are not salahori horses, little gadje.’

‘Have you never been blooded, dear boy?’ said Mad Jack. ‘Jump a hedge, jump some shifties with a little cutlery on the end of their rifles. All the same to me.’

Oliver leapt onto the back of the gypsy’s mare and flourished his witch-blade. ‘Good luck commodore, you’ve just been promoted to what’s left of the Jackelian navy.’

‘Ah, lad, when you get to that asylum of yours, have them warm up a cell for you. You’ll put poor old Blacky in his grave yet.’

‘How does a man who does not know horses ride bareback?’ demanded the gypsy woman.

‘My memory comes and goes.’

Mad Jack spun his horse around and pointed his sabre down the bridge. ‘All those who would ride as free men, all those who would ride for Jackals — then ride with me now!’

Their trot became a canter became a gallop, the thunder of their hooves and the screams of the gypsies filling the long run of the bridge. At the other end of the bridge the glass-crack of charges sounded as the order to fire at will rippled down the enemy line. Horses fell, the easiest target to hit and as fatal to their rider as if the bullets had found their hearts, lost beneath the storm of the charge.

Oliver risked a quick glance away from the rapidly approaching barricade and the frantically reloading Third Brigade men. Commodore Black was scurrying down to the moored jinn palace, a handful of Ben Carl’s loyalists carrying Tinfold down the steps behind him.

Streamers of fire twisted around the gypsy witch’s painted arms in front of Oliver. ‘Kris, kris, kris,’ she yelled. They were no longer a charge of cavalry — they were thunder taken mortal form and hurtling towards the Quatershiftian line, the din of their hooves and cries painful to hear.

In front of them the bayonet-tipped rifles of the Quatershiftian line rose like the spines on a hedgehog.

‘The wall,’ shouted Molly to her steamman friend as the two possessed convicts flew towards them. ‘Use your voice on the wall.’

Slowstack swivelled to face the stone passage and his voicebox shook as he used the fighting frequency of the knights steammen, a spider web of cracks forming along the wall under the violence of his voice.

Dark energy rolled down the passage, the inhuman banshee howls of the Wildcaotyl channelled through corporeal throats. On the wall the cracks spread, slow at first, then rippling out as the pressure of the magma-drain behind the wall widened the fissure, the earth’s fury forcing its way out. Shards of the green stone favoured by the Chimecans blew off, followed by a geyser of molten rock.

Molly caught sight of the two convicts pushing back at the magma with their black light as they tried to retreat. Then her view was cut off as the slab of stone in the ceiling smashed down an inch in front of their position. She felt the rumble of the second door sealing the breach out of sight. Magma caught under the edge of the door began to cool, hissing by their feet.

‘Molly softbody, that was reckless. What if the trigger on the fire door had malfunctioned?’

‘Then at least we would have had the pleasure of the company of those two jiggers as we moved along the Circle.’ She pointed at one of the crystal growths on the stone floor. ‘That fire sensor is broken, I can feel it. It just looks wrong. But the one on the other side looked good.’

Slowstack let out a whistle — part relief, part frustration. ‘Let us see if your senses can lead us towards the Hexmachina.’

‘You have a good voice, Slowstack. You should have been a steamman knight.’

Slowstack ignored the teasing. The passages they travelled changed from rough-hewn stone to more intricate paths — false pillars and Doric columns supporting the ceilings, as if the craftsmen of the fallen empire had been drafted in to expend one last burst of vigour at their deepest levels. What did not change was the energy-sapping heat, the rubble of shattered crystal machines that would have regulated the temperature littering their path. Occasionally they came across a cooling crystal still working, glowing like a sun and humming and vibrating from the strain of trying to keep the oven-like temperatures in check.

The two friends passed across a drawbridge that lay suspended over a bubbling channel of magma into a chamber with dark oily walls stretching up high into the darkness. Molly peered at the statues of the Wildcaotyl gods lining the cavern, carved out of a black diamond material, dark stone that seemed to swallow the light of the wall crystals still flickering in their mounts.

‘She’s close, Slowstack. My body is trembling with the power of her.’

‘This is as deep as the cities of Chimeca extend,’ said the steamman. ‘There are passages that could take us further out underneath the seabed, but none deeper. This is the limit of their territory, the depth of their wound upon the body of the earth.’

At the far end of the vault were piles of bones, not food for a whitegnaw this time, but legionnaires of the old empire. They lay in ordered rows in front of four massive doors — gates large enough to have accommodated the bulk of a Jackelian aerostat. Among the dust and shards of bone lay black plates of armour sewn together with a cable mesh, odd rifles, a mixture of stone and crystal that looked like something a child might cobble together as a toy.

‘They were guarding this entrance, Molly softbody, to the very end. They died from starvation still standing here rather than abandon their post.’

Molly shivered as she stepped through the dust that had once been the hearts of such men; capable of holding their position even as their comrades dropped dying from thirst and hunger around them. Fanatics. Picking a path through the ancient remains she laid a palm on one of the doors, metal and peculiarly cold in the febrile air.

Her blood moved to its own secret tides and she gasped as her body wrenched to one side of its own volition. Molly tried to say something to Slowstack but her voice came out as a gargling hymn of machine noise, a golden light warming her palm, spreading out along the surface of the door and glowing so bright Molly had to shut her eyes. The burning radiance seemed to seep through her eyelids, so painful she cried out. Then it was gone, leaving a headache dancing in her forehead. Molly opened her eyes. The doors had vanished as if they had never existed and the two of them were standing at the rim of a polished crater filled with a coral-growth of black complexity. Threads of glass, millions of them, grown into shapes that pulsed and moved with their own simulacrum of life.

‘A machine,’ said Slowstack in awe. ‘But not of the metal.’

Molly realized it was cold in the room. After days of furnace-like heat, dreaming of the cool autumns of Middlesteel, she was actually shivering.

‘No, old steamer. Not of the metal. Those threads are crystallised blood, drawn from the bodies of the Chimecan lords’ own children. The ultimate sacrifice that their gods called upon them to make.’

Molly’s body fizzed with revulsion at this sly abomination, her proximity to it triggering her relationship with the Hexmachina. Her blood was changing, the structures of her body rebuilding themselves into something new. She was the daughter of Vindex and the philosopher slave had seen this thing, she knew that. He had stood exactly where she stood now and felt the same emotions, passions that had pushed him into leading the revolt of the slave nations.

‘Molly softbody, what is the function of this artefact?’

‘Nothing yet,’ said Molly. She felt the echo of the words in her head before she said them. The Hexmachina was so close now. ‘It is only half built. But had its construction been finalized, then it would have been a pipe, a pipe to play a tune for the Wildcaotyl, to crack the substance of the great pattern and allow the Wildcaotyl to call down their own gods. Meta-gods! Beings far beyond the frail substance of our universe.’

‘By Steelbhalah-Waldo’s beard,’ hissed Slowstack, ‘there are hymns among the people that are never sung. Names that are never said for fear of what power they might allow into the world. For the Wildcaotyl to do such a thing! The Circle would be closed, the great pattern dissolved. We believed that all the Wildcaotyl desired was to encase the earth in ice again, to return the Chimecan Empire to its ancient glory and control our life force as food for their table.’

Molly shook her head. ‘Poor mad Tzlayloc. He thought he was preparing the way for a perfect order, but the order was never his. It is to be his Wildcaotyl masters’, a perfect cold eternity of complete method … no chaos, no warmth, no gravity or movement or change. Everything subservient to the meta-gods’ inert dominion and the will of the Wildcaotyl. We would all be equal in a way — equal in our non-existence, equal in our living death within a circle of time without end. That is the future my ancestor glimpsed. Why he dared rebel against the Chimecan Empire.’

‘Molly softbody, you are changing,’ said Slowstack, his voicebox disturbed.

He tracked back; the same golden nimbus that had disintegrated the door was now lifting off Molly’s skin in waves, an aurora borealis that made the Wildcaotyl’s instrument of ultimate destruction glitter like a million crimson stars in a dark firmament. Slowstack’s own hull lit up with the glow, the golden energy making his body feel as hale as Slowcogs once had, before Onestack had fused their bodies together in a desecration.

Molly groaned and leant on the railing around the crater’s rim, collapsing to her knees with the strain of her body’s changes.

As the glow faded Slowstack’s vision plate cleared and he saw the dark figure standing three feet behind Molly, black fire leaking from his eyes, the sound of his malevolent laughter an echo from the pits of a nightmare.

Damson Davenport found it hard to keep up with the others — they had been equalized longer than she had and were used to the flat, dull way everything looked in their new bodies. She was continually reaching for things on the mill bench and missing them, or knocking them onto the floor. It was the nice cup of caffeel at the end of the day she missed most. The coke they fed into their boiler chutes might burn for days in their sorcerous new forms but she still remembered what it was like to taste things, to have an appetite. The work leaders boasted that they had eliminated hunger — well, that was true, in a way. And she missed the peace of sleep too. She could only rest for an hour or so in this new body and when she woke up from the dreamless respite she hardly felt refreshed at all.

‘Keep up with the line,’ shouted their company’s work leader, banging her iron back with his punishment wand. ‘Compatriot Davenport, you are slowing the column. Can you not take Compatriot Carker as your example? What a fine worker she is, what a fine example to the people she serves.’

Compatriot Carker had found the measure of how to trot in her new body. But then Harriet Carker was a Grimhope loyalist, one of the first to be equalized — the daft fool had volunteered for this existence, had been one of the subterranean renegades who had set up the flesh mills down below in the outlaw realm.

It was so hard to tell the equalized apart — the loyalists from the conscripts. You learned to watch what you said and to whom. Damson Davenport had only tasted the pain stick once and it was enough to cow her tongue. The rumours of a resistance, the rumours of a counter-revolution, had been denied by the company leaders. But then they had interrupted the evening reading of Community and the Commons to deny them. They might have sliced her up and stuffed her into this shambling new body of metal and flesh, but they had not cut away her common sense. She could see the fear in the eyes of the brilliant men. She could see the upside down Vs — the lion’s teeth — that had been scrawled on the walls of the streets; she could see the distant smoke and hear the fighting.

‘Halt,’ shouted the company leader. They were outside the Circlist cathedral on the Lilburne road, Third Brigade troops lined up and guarding the doors. What could be inside, wondered Damson Davenport? The practice of Circlist worship was a pain-rod offence now; the company leaders had made that clear. Wagons were drawn up outside, dozens of them with canvas covers concealing their valuable cargo.

‘Form up,’ shouted the company leader to the column of equalized workers. ‘Eight each to a wagon. Then we pull them to Parliament Square. After we have delivered the wagons we will return to this street — there will be more wagons waiting for us. This will be our duty until we are reassigned back to the cannon works.’

The royal we, thought Damson Davenport, as the company leader climbed up to the top of one of the wagons while his equalized compatriots did as they were bid.

‘These wagons are meant for horses,’ said Damson Davenport. It came out before she realized she had spoken.

‘They’ve been eating them,’ whispered the metal-flesher behind her, voicebox set on low. ‘I heard the brilliant men complaining that it is the only meat left in Middlesteel now.’

Damson Davenport glanced around. Thank the Circle the company leader had not heard the uncommunityist exchange. To gossip was to steal exertion from the cause — they had been warned against that too. A mixture of Third Brigade troops and brilliant men escorted the large convoy, holding their rifles ready as they marched. A small glimmer of hope rose in her. If they were being guarded, then there was still something to guard against in Middlesteel.

Gates on a barricade with the muzzles of galloper cannons protruding out were heaved back outside Parliament Square. A squat black building had been raised in the centre of the square, its stacks venting oily black smoke into the snow-pregnant sky. Damson Davenport noticed the rubble of the statues that had been smashed to make way for this new structure. Something else had been added recently too — a tall stone cross which had been driven into the ground outside the entrance to the House of Guardians, a figure strapped to it howling like a banshee, his screams carrying across the cold space of the square. Above the figure being punished a crimson-filled jewel boiled as snowflakes fell across it and turned to steam.

Third Brigade soldiers pulled the canvas covers off the wagons, revealing the cages underneath. In Damson Davenport’s chest the calculation drums ground in shock. The cages were filled with people, once-fine clothes ripped and soiled by confinement in a space a Jackelian would not have wished to keep a street hound in. There were old men, families and children, the school uniforms of the private academies ruined by weeks of sleeping and living in them. The strangest thing of all was how quiet they were. They were just standing there, resigned. Why weren’t they angry? These were the city’s quality — they were used to the finest food and the finest accommodation Middlesteel had to offer. Now they had been reduced to gaunt figures without enough spark to spill even a tear for their own predicament.

Soldiers unlocked the cage walls and pushed the dirty prisoners to form a line leading towards the squat structure. Behind her the company leader was talking to one of the brilliant men. After the conversation was over, the leader came over to Damson Davenport and cut her out of the team pulling the wagon. ‘You are slowing the wagons down, compatriot. You are not yet used to your beautiful new form, so I have decided to show compassion to you. You will be working on the Collar’s boiler for the rest of today.’

The Collar? So, that is what a Gideon’s Collar looked like. He led her to the middle of the square, over to the furnace being stoked on the back of the construction. Inside the building she could hear the crack of the bolts as they fired. One every five seconds. Quick, painless, humane. Clearly the product of an advanced society. Damson Davenport looked down at the fuel being fed into the furnace by the equalized workers. ‘These are books, Compatriot Coordinator.’

‘Supplies of coal have run low, Compatriot Davenport,’ said the company leader, indicating the snow. ‘Your concern does you credit — but the books are an adequate fuel source and you will not find any copies of Community and the Commons among them.’

Of course, there was only one book for the land now. She took a shovel from the company leader and joined the others digging out piles of books and tossing them into the flames of the furnace. She did not feel the heat from the furnace, but then she did not feel the cold either; she knew what the temperature was, her body could tell her that. She just did not feel it. Piercing screams from the figure on the cross nearly made her spill a blade full of tomes onto the snow. ‘Who is that?’

One of her co-workers turned his voicebox in her direction. ‘The King.’

‘The King? But he is dead, isn’t he?’

‘The new King.’

‘Oh dear.’ She looked at the distant figure writhing on the cross. She must have missed the coronation festival. Everyone back home had so been looking forward to that — she had been building up a little store of rotten fruit for weeks in her room, just so she could throw it on coronation day. Bitterly disappointed, she went back to feeding the fires of the Gideon’s Collar.